During the production and development of masks for producing semiconductor components, CAD systems are employed. These systems are capable of calculating individual exposure planes which can be transferred to a pattern generator for the purpose of mask production, from a semiconductor layout present in terms of data.
Then, with the aid of an electron beam, the pattern generator exposes the given structures onto a mask. One problem in this case is, however, that, because of its resolution, the pattern generator can expose only predefined structures, preferably rectangular structures, in a specific surface extent. For this reason, before the exposure, the mask layout has to be fractionated into individual rectangles, before it can be transferred to the pattern generator in the form of control data.
In this case, it proves to be a problem that, as a result of the rectangular conversion of complex geometric forms into rectangles, rectangles are also necessarily produced whose surfaces are so small that they cannot be processed by the pattern generator. These are called slivers.
According to the prior art, the slivers are ignored during the exposure of the mask. However, this procedure has an extremely detrimental effect on the critical structure size and, under certain circumstances, prevents the processing of particularly small or dimensionally stable structures. Furthermore, the unexposed slivers reduce the structure quality of the mask and can thus also have a detrimental effect on the quality of the end product.